Despite pressing the reset button, and agreeing on a key nuclear weapons reduction treaty, Russia and the United States have a new scandal brewing. In August, a U.S. court ruled that Russia must hand over a large Hasidic Jewish archive to a U.S. organization. In response, Russia said it will stop sending exhibitions to the United States until they are absolutely certain that Russia’s cultural property is not in danger of appropriation.
The archive in question is a collection of thousands of books and documents compiled by Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, who lived in Lyubavichi, present-day Smolensk region, in the nineteenth century. Part of the Schneersohn collection was sent to Moscow when he left Lyubavichi during WWI, fleeing the front. The collection was eventually nationalized by the Bolsheviks. Schneersohn took another part of the collection with him from the Soviet Union to Poland. There it was eventually seized, first by the Nazis and then by the Soviet army, which then sent it to the Russian State Library. Schneersohn died in 1950, leaving no heirs.
Though the U.S. Jewish community has been demanding the collection since the early 1990s, Russia argued that the collection is Russian state property and has ignored the court proceedings launched in 2004, never sending its representatives.
This summer a U.S. court finally sided with the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavich organization, ruling that Russia is holding the archives illegally and should surrender the collection. The ruling has Russia’s cultural authorities seething.
“Now it turns out Russia’s property is not protected by diplomatic immunity on the territory of the United States and can be arrested. Thus, we will not be sending anything right now…,” Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev told Ekho Moskvy radio. “If there will not be 100 percent guarantees, but only a 95 or 99 percent guarantee of our rights, we will not send anything.”
Former Olympic champion gymnast turned Duma deputy and TV host Alina Kabayeva (left) wants to make a doll of herself and has applied for a trademark patent on the expression “Alina Doll.” Kabayeva’s spokeswoman confirmed that the ex-gymnast’s doll is in the initial development stages and that it will be handed out to young gymnasts at an upcoming sports festival.
Kabayeva, 27, has gained clout since retiring from professional sports, and has been dabbling in television, building a stadium in South Ossetia, and reportedly buying a stadium and nearby park in Moscow. The rumor mill also whispers that she is romantically involved with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and she is known to never show up for Duma sessions.
Continuing a tradition started by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko sold a painting she made for R6 million ($200,000). The painting, New Years Eve, was sold at a charity auction in Russia’s second capital to Vladimir Podvalny, a businessman who owns a meat factory in Pskov region. Podvalny also bought up art by his regional boss, Governor Andrei Turchak. Turchak’s Blini sold for a bargain R3 million ($100,000).
A restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s black and white classic film Battleship Potemkin will briefly hit select US theaters in March. The intent is to showcase the restored 35mm print that features scenes cut since the film’s 1925 Moscow premiere. The original, known so well to the western world, had many scenes cut by the Berlin company that bought it from the Soviets.* They were apparently bowing to pressure from the Weimar government, which feared a spread of Bolshevism.
The film was restored by Kino International [kino.com], which previously released a similar restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
After years of painstaking collaborative work by archival workers across the globe, Battleship Potemkin was shown in New York in January, and is scheduled to run in Los Angeles on March 18-24, according to Hollywood Reporter. The film is also available as a DVD from Kino.
* The Battleship Potemkin was banned from public showing in Britain until 1954, out of fear of working class insurrection.
Russian theater and film director Kirill Serebrennikov [one of Russian Life’s 100 Young Russians To Watch] staged a novel believed to be the brainchild of Russia’s main political puppeteer, Vladislav Surkov. The novel, called Okolonolya, was authored by Natan Dubovitsky, a pen name that many people in the know have confirmed to be Surkov.
Surkov, right, an intellectual whose Kremlin office has an impressive library and features portraits ranging from Che Guevara to Joseph Brodsky and Tupak Shakur, has authored magazine columns, and done a poetry reading of the works of American poet Allen Ginsberg.
Meanwhile, Surkov (his official title is presidential first deputy chief of staff) is a key supporter of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, as well as the invisible hand directing various Kremlin-supported youth movements. The staging of Okolonolya had Russia’s theater community split down the middle: one half accused Serebryannikov of selling his soul for favors from the authorities, others didn’t think staging a clever postmodernist piece of drama must necessarily be viewed as political.
Okolonolya (the book brands itself as “gangsta fiction”) is about 40-year-old Yegor Samokhodov, who falls in love with a second-rate actress. She invites him to a performance where her character is brutally killed. Yegor finds out that the theater studio shows real violence and actually kills its actors, then travels to the Russian Caucasus searching for truth and the studio’s headquarters, only to become its next victim.
Critics, while clearly impressed with the play, called it hopeless and cynical. “These postmodernist games around a postmodernist piece, by God, they give off some demonic vibe,” wrote the cultural news website Openspace. “Authority is like a dragon in the fog. No matter how you attempt to tame authority, it will eat you up.”
A new spy scandal is unfolding between Russia and the United Kingdom. This time the heroine is Katia Zatuliveter, 25, a former assistant to British MP Mike Hancock.* Britain is accusing Zatuliveter of spying for Russia and wants to deport her, but she has denied any wrongdoing.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has slammed Britain’s “unacceptable” decision to keep her waiting another nine months before a decision is made on her fate, while keeping her on strict bail conditions that allow her little contact beyond the confines of her home.
While no proof has been made public to confirm Zatuliveter’s espionage activity, she can rest easy knowing that there is a booming market for ex-spies in Russia. Anna Chapman (left), caught and deported from the United States last year for spying activity, has launched her own talk show.
* British MP Mike Hancock, who sits on the Parliament’s Defence Committee, met Zatuliveter on one of his regular trips to Russia. She had access to all of the committee’s documents for a period of three years. Hancock said she passed a two-month long security check. UK security forces fear 20 similar spies may be under deep cover in the country.
Он фальсифицировал их невероятным образом “He falsified them [the results] to an unbelievable degree... [Polls show] that he received no more than 30 percent, 38 with the maximum margin of error. So, this man holds onto power by repressions and state banditry, by state terror.”
Stanislav Shushkevich, the first president of Belarus, on the fourth reelection of Alexander Lukashenko, which was followed by mass beatings and arrests of protestors in Minsk. Official results gave Lukashenko over 78 percent of the vote. (Ekho Moskvy)
The increasingly powerful Russian Orthodox Church,* which of late has been criticized for getting too cozy with Russian authorities, has put forward ideas for how to decrease ethnic tensions and violence. The Church compiled a resolution, along with Kremlin-friendly youth movements like Young Russia, that calls for teaching migrants Russian, and creating an emergency “anti-crisis response team” that would be dispatched to locales with brewing ethnic tensions. To ensure inclusive representation, the team would have members from various religious communities:
Muslim, Orthodox, Jewish and Buddhist, who would patrol mass public events in an effort to staunch nationalist or religious tensions. But critics say that, by being so closely allied with the government, which is often directly or indirectly behind ethnic abuses and crackdowns on demonstrations, the Church is trying to have it both ways.
Meanwhile, Orthodox Church spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin (left, with Duma Vice Speaker Lyuba Sliska) infuriated women in January by suggesting that Russia introduce a national dress code, and that women in mini-skirts can “provoke not just a Caucasus native, but a Russian as well... especially if she is drunk.”
The remarks by Chaplin, who has a track record of strident statements, led to an online petition to the Patriarch. Several thousand people complained about Chaplin’s misogynism, and argued that he had “traded the conversation about the problem of violence against women for a discussion about their appearance.”
* The Russian Orthodox Church, as of February 2010, had 160 dioceses that included 30,142 parishes, 207 bishops, 28,434 priests and 788 monasteries. (partriarchia.ru)
Russia defeated Finland 6-1 in the World Championships in bandy before a capacity crowd in Kazan (Tatarstan). It is the 20th time Russia has taken the gold.
Russian skaters took two silvers and one bronze in the European Figure Skating Championships in Bern. Alexander Smirnov and Yuko Kawaguti came second in pairs, and Alexander Zhulin got silver in men’s ice dancing. Artur Gachinsky took fifth in men’s singles and is a rising star to watch for 2014.
Alena Zavarzina took the gold at the World Snowboard Championships in La Molina, Spain. She is only the second Russian to win gold in snowboarding (Yekaterina Tudegesheva won in 2007).
Olympic speed skating medalist Ivan Skobrev (from Khabarovsk) won his first ever World Cup gold, winning the 1500m, silvering in the 5000m, and winning gold in the men’s team pursuit race.
Путин либо всех за дураков считает, либо страдает склерозом.
“One has to understand that either Putin thinks everyone is a fool or he is suffering from dementia. In the 1990s, Putin was friends with Berezovsky while I was at war with him… Mr. Putin, of course, wants to forget this, and wants the entire country to forget it. We will use this case to remind the citizens of our country how Putin became president and who is his godfather.”
Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov explaining why he is suing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, after Putin accused Nemtsov and exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky of causing havoc in the turbulent 1990s. (Radio Svoboda)
The poster villain of Russia’s wild 1990s, Sergei Mavrodi, founder of the MMM pyramid scheme, announced a new project via his blog (sergeymavrodi.blogspot.com). Called MMM-2011, or “Мы Можем Многое” (“We can do many things”), the scheme has participants buy “tickets” through an electronic banking system and are paid 20 percent dividends (30 percent for pensioners).
In this anonymous Ponzi scheme, participants know only the head of their group of ten, while this head only has contact with his group and one person above him, who oversees ten such groups.
Mavrodi’s notorious MMM was immensely popular in post-Soviet Russia, stripping up to 40 million people of their savings, for which crime Mavrodi spent four years behind bars. This time, he alleges, everything is legal. “The system is legal, transparent, and unsinkable,” he wrote.
Russian authorities were not convinced. The anti-monopoly agency officially called it a financial pyramid, and prosecutors demanded that internet providers block access to Mavrodi’s blog, which by press time had gathered about 1600 comments. “Sergei, you are a genius! You offer me a chance to become a billionaire in ten years, and you will become one even earlier!” said one comment. Others were not as friendly: “They should have HUNG you, you monster,” another wrote.
добровольный союз негодяев и идиотов
“How do I define a pyramid scheme? Honestly, it seems to me it is a voluntary union of scoundrels and idiots.”
Vladimir Platonov, head of the Moscow City Duma (Itogi)
Mikhail Khodorkovsky (above, left, with fellow prisoner Platon Lebedev), the former head of Yukos oil company who received a controversial second jail term at the end of 2010, has published a book that compiles his interviews and articles penned while in jail.
Khodorkovsky signed copies while in his courtroom cage, waiting for the Moscow judge Viktor Danilkin to read aloud the hundreds of pages of the verdict, which lawyers said resembled almost verbatim the prosecutors’ charges.
The book was compiled by Khodorkovsky’s most notable interviewers, the writers Boris Akunin and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, who have spoken out in Khodorkovsky’s defense after conducting long Q&As with him by correspondence. “There was a battle between publishing houses to publish this book, but when it actually came out, not all bookstores are eager to carry it, and several are simply afraid,” Ulitskaya told Ekho Moskvy radio.
Meanwhile, Khodorkovsky’s prosecutors, who are believed to be acting on orders from Russia’s authorities, namely Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was president when Khodorkovsky was first jailed, told Komsomolskaya Pravda daily that a third trial is possible. Observers had guessed as much after Putin infamously said that the Yukos chief’s hands are “covered in blood.” A murder charge could keep him in jail for a very long time.
“The Mikhail Khodorkovsky case became a symbol of systematic problems with the rule of law, legal nihilism and respect for human rights in Russia.”
European Parliament president Jerzy Buzek on Khodorkovsky’s sentencing.
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